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Last week, the flames in the Hell Garage licked up around the rusty flanks of a couple of vintage Toyota wagons. In a new and particularly cruel twist, I've abused the power of my role as a 24 Hours of LeMons judge to persuade a LeMons racer to buy the 1968 Crown, and he'll be adding the old Toyota as a companion to his equally hellish Subaru-engined Wartburg 311 race car. Knowing that my words have the power to induce innocent victims to plunge into the Fabrication Nightmare Lake-O-Fire™ just feels right! So, in honor of ill-advised, low-dollar/high-blood-loss road-race cars everywhere, this week's Project Car Hell will be about a couple of diamond-in-the-incredibly-rough postwar German machines that would make just about the dumbest yet most amazing track cars in human history.

But just to make your task more hellish, and therefore more satisfying, the outcome of this project will need to be a car that can be driven on the street as well as the track. That means you'll need to worry about such things as headlights, paint and registration. Did I say registration? The seller of this one-owner '58 Borgward Isabella TS claims the car has a clear title, which makes the project 0.0041 percent much simpler. The Isabella was regarded as a pretty decent machine in its day (if you were a Stalingrad veteran who felt that any vehicle not crushed flat beneath a T-34's treads was pretty decent), and even though collectors will never haven't yet pushed prices of nice ones into the stratosphere you'll find that only the nerdiest anoraks everybody will admire your gleaming, race-ready example.

To get to that point, however, will require reassembling a car that appears to have been in pieces since the last Borgward rolled off the assembly line in Mexico. (Sadly, the Isabella was never produced in Mexico after Borgward Deutschland's demise, so you won't be able to get any parts south of the border.)

Yes, it's one of those never-finished projects that consists of a rusty, gutted shell of a car with a garage full of dusty boxes of parts and random body components leaned up against the walls. The seller claims everything is there, except for the windshield that he broke during disassembly, and that "THIS CAR IS VERY RARE AND WORTH WELL ABOVE ASKING PRICE IN PARTS ALONE!!" You can tell that he's serious because of the use of all caps and multiple exclamation points, and why wouldn't he be? You just need to find a Borgward Isabella windshield, which will no doubt involve a lot of culturally enriching communications with junkyard owners in der vaterland, fix the see-through floors, and then turn the ancient, no-doubt-frozen-solid 1,493-cc engine into a reliable racin' powerplant.

Then there's the interior. And the wiring. And, well, everything. But don't dwell on the pool of molten sulfur you'll be diving into for this project; think of the glory of your street/race Isabella!

The problem with the Isabella, apart from its obvious orphan-car-ness and overall decripitude, is that you wouldn't get to explain--in tedious detail--how Borgward is really an important ancestor of a current manufacturer. For that, you'll need a DKW (or a Horch, or a Wanderer). Borgward is completely kaput these days, but a few random segments of DKW DNA can still be found in Audi today.

As your listeners' eyes glaze over, you'll explain how DKW was one of the four rings in the Auto Union logo and thus a sort of proto-semi-crypto-ancestor of modern-day Audi. Best of all, DKW stands for Dampf-Kraft-Wagen, and who doesn't want a car with "Dampf" in its name? Bad people, that's who!

It's tough to find a DKW of any sort in North America these days, particularly one that's inexpensive enough to serve as the basis for a righteous street/track machine, but the Beelzebublian minions of the Project Car Hell crew have unearthed this 1953 DKW 3=6 in Texas, and--get this--the price is a mere $250 at the time of this writing. This one was used for a photo shoot involving a model dressed in some sort of 24th-century moon-base flapper outfit, which the seller believes adds to its value. It has front-wheel drive, and it has a two-stroke, three-cylinder engine. Imagine taking this fine racing machine into the wall through the Carousel at Sears Point, with the smell of two-stroke oil adding to the general racy ambiance? To get there, you'll need to fix a few things, though.

So the DKW has a few needs. And some rust. And it's missing a lot of parts.

First of all, there's rust. Plenty of rust. The seller uses three different colors of text to add meaning to the description, which includes some bad news (the engine is in pieces, most of which are missing) and some good news ("The car was used for rally racing back in the '60s and early '70s. There are several plaques on the glovebox from a few of those races").

The glass is all there, and it's "90% complete," which translates to "45 percent complete" when we go from eBay-Seller-ese to English. You'll need to go through the suspension and fabricate a completely new setup from scratch, but that's why the world has machine shops and you have money!

The interior will need to be a combination of race functionality and mid-century German modern style, which means another few cubic yards of cash will go to your soon-to-be-very-bewildered local upholstery shop. Ah, but it will all be worth it when your 100-hp, nitro-burning DKW 3=6 takes its equal sign out there on the track for the first time.